G-Cloud and ServiceNow help improve government efficiency and service delivery

G-Cloud brings enhanced service delivery to the Belgian government
Across Europe, many governments are moving IT services to the cloud to improve efficiency and reduce costs. By replacing isolated, sometimes aging, legacy systems with centralised shared services, government organisations can improve data security and focus IT, financial, and human resources to support the organisation’s primary business objectives.

In Belgium, the federal government and social security institutions set up an ambitious program called G-Cloud—a combination of commercial public cloud services, private cloud services, and managed information and communications technology (ICT) services hosted in government data centres. The hybrid cloud services could provide up to 80,000 government users with communications and collaboration services, and includes a self-service portal to request applications, services, and infrastructure.

G-Cloud and ServiceNow offer a comprehensive solution for Belgian’s shared services organisation
ITSM-as-a-Service, an offering for IT service management and customer relationship management, was set up within G-Cloud using ServiceNow. This allows Belgian’s shared in-house ICT organisation, Smals, to offer ITSM-as-a-Service to the organisations it supports. Now, within the G-Cloud service portfolio, Smals offers both a cloud-based IT service management tool that is fully managed and a dedicated instance for individual government agencies. This supports the agencies’ ongoing efforts to consolidate different tools, spreadsheets, and manual processes that may exist.

“We were faced with older tools with a lot of redundant data and little integration,” says Luc Billion, Operational Director Infrastructure, Systems, Services and Support for Smals. “Our call centre staff and IT support team used separate systems, which sometimes resulted in information being duplicated or unavailable. We needed to change our culture and we needed more transparency. We wanted to make our environment easier to manage by moving to a single, cloud-based toolset.”

ServiceNow delivers a cloud-based solution with multitenancy support
The new solution had to support multitenancy in order for the project to be successful—meaning that there had to be a different domain for every G-Cloud customer. “We knew that keeping domains separate would be essential to maintaining customer satisfaction,” says David Dothée, Project Manager for G-Cloud ITSM at Smals. “Otherwise, it would be chaotic to manage and difficult for us to meet the government’s high standards for quality support and fast incident resolution.”

As required by law, Smals put out a public tender for IT service management software and evaluated several competing solutions. “ServiceNow was the only solution that met all of our requirements, including multitenancy support and the possibility to use a cloud-based CMDB for certain data, and an on-premises CMDB for confidential data,” says David.

Smals worked with ServiceNow partner Fujitsu to integrate ServiceNow IT Service Management with the government’s existing systems. In addition, Smals uses ServiceNow Customer Service Management to replace traditional CRM tools and accelerate time to resolution. “It was a very smooth deployment, and ServiceNow and Fujitsu worked well together to accomplish our goals,” says David.

“We found ServiceNow to be easily customisable, although most of the functionality we needed was out of the box. It’s also user-friendly, which helped with training.”

Smals sees a nearly 50% reduction in support tickets and 15% increase in IT support staff efficiency thanks to G-Cloud and ServiceNow
By replacing disparate tools and manual processes with ServiceNow and G-Cloud, the Belgian government is on its way to achieve dramatically improved IT efficiency. Previously, Smals was handling an average of 15,000 support tickets per month. With ServiceNow, that number has dropped to approximately 8,000.

According to Luc, “We were able to find better ways of working. As a result, ServiceNow has contributed to reducing our average support ticket volume by nearly 50%. It also drove a 15% increase in overall efficiency for our IT support staff, because now there is a single tool that contains the information needed to provide quick resolution and close tickets faster.”

ServiceNow helps deliver better experiences for users and citizens
Instead of spending time following email trails or calling the contact center, G-Cloud users are able to track tickets from submission to resolution through a self-service portal and plan business activities accordingly. Users who do call tend to get issues resolved immediately, as call centre employees use ServiceNow® Knowledge Management to have answers readily available.

The Smals IT support team benefits as well—armed with the tools and information to be more effective, they are more satisfied with their jobs, and have consistently positive and productive interactions with users.

“Before, our support team was overloaded with emails, which hindered their ability to meet service level requirements,” says David. “ServiceNow allows our IT support team to go from responding to emails to conducting true root-cause analyses of problems and incidents, helping us avoid similar issues in the future.”

Citizens who depend on e-government systems to receive pensions, pay taxes, and fill electronic prescriptions also benefit from the high service availability that comes with efficient incident management. “As we move more e-government systems into G-Cloud, ServiceNow will give us the fast incident resolution we need to keep Belgium’s public-facing ICT applications, such as social security and e-health, available,” Luc says.

ServiceNow is at the heart of a natural service delivery evolution with G-Cloud
With ServiceNow part of the G-Cloud service offering, the Belgian government is able to offer better quality IT services at a lower cost, keeping pace with IT modernisation trends in Europe and around the world. By bringing service delivery into the 21st Century, it can:

• Offer consistently high service quality, exceeding SLAs
• Give users faster access to the latest technology
• Keep government employees effective and morale high
• Reduce cost by eliminating legacy systems, maintenance, and licensing

“With the G-Cloud program, we expect savings of approximately €30 million over the next five years. ITSM-as-a-Service is one of the initiatives in the G-Cloud portfolio that will help us achieve this objective,” says Luc. “As we gain momentum in IT, we plan to leverage ServiceNow for savings in other areas, including asset and facilities management.”

More flexibility and reduced risk are on the horizon for G-Cloud users
Smals is in the process of moving its on-premises service catalog to the ServiceNow cloud-based solution to streamline request fulfillment, which will give it unprecedented workflow flexibility and automation capabilities for both internal and external users. Smals also plans to use ServiceNow® Change and Release Management to reduce incidents even further.

By structuring change and release processes more efficiently, Smals can reduce the need for overtime and long hours, even during periods of intense change, giving employees a better work/life balance.

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